The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK

by Fletcher Flora

  The longing could not be denied. Leaving the house, he walked in darkness to the store and let himself in. A small night light was burning at the rear.

  In the shadows, he found his apron and put it on and stood behind the counter as if he waited for a nocturnal customer. He stood there for a long time, and he was aware that it was not the same, that something was lacking, and then he realized that he could smell nothing.

  The magic odor, recovered daily from the enchanted past, was dissipated, gone, lost forever in the acrid stench of chlorine and acid, and lost and gone with it were the thousand and one associations that had sweetened his days for all his years.

  What have I done? he thought dully.

  And standing alone in bleak sterility, he answered his own question.

  I’m dead, he thought. I’ve killed myself.

  The next afternoon, when Jimmy Cobb reported for work and found the store closed, he merely decided that Mr. Fleming was observing a brief period of mourning, and he went quietly away.

  It was, in fact, two days before Mr. Fleming was widely missed, and still another day before authority could be prevailed upon to enter the store. Inasmuch as the neighbors had been incited by anxiety to grim expectations, no one was greatly surprised when Mr. Fleming was found dead in his cooler, a tight little death chamber. There was a tin pail on the floor of the cooler.

  Beside the pail, empty, were a bottle that had contained bleach and a can that had contained toilet-bowl cleaner.

  Mr. Fleming’s body, thanks to the low temperature in the cooler, was very well preserved.

  It was considered both pitiable and romantic that Mr. Fleming, in his grief, had chosen to die deliberately by the same domestic devil’s brew that had killed his wife accidentally. But it must be remembered that Mr. Fleming, being a kind of poet, was given to poetic fancies.

  THE HAPPENSTANCE SNATCH

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1966.

  Banty was all brains and no luck. That was his trouble. You kept thinking he was a guy on his way to somewhere, with all those brains under black curly hair, but he never did have the luck when he needed it. It makes no difference how smart or good-looking you are; you aren’t going to attain your objective if you don’t have a little luck here and there along the way.

  You take the triplets Banty held in a stud game in Kansas City. Anyone would consider it the best kind of luck in the world to hold a hand like that in a game of stud, one in the hole and two showing, and anyone with any brains at all would back it up with his grandmother’s pension if necessary. But what seems like good luck one minute may turn out to be bad the next, and it’s just about as bad as luck can be, when you consider the consequences, to hold triplets when the guy across the table is holding a straight. About the only way you could make it worse would be to bet your triplets with money you didn’t have on the table, or anywhere else, and to have someone like Archie Flowers holding the straight. And Banty did. And Archie was.

  I wasn’t there, but Banty told me about it. I hadn’t seen him around for a day or two, so I went up to his room to see if he was there, and there he was. He hadn’t shaved, and he’d been drinking. He’d have been drinking still, except that the bottle was empty and he didn’t have enough money to buy one that wasn’t.

  “What’s the matter, Banty? You don’t look good.”

  “Look, stupid,” he said, “don’t come up here telling me how I look.”

  He called me stupid lots of times, and some of the times I didn’t like it, even though it was true, which I admit, but I never made a big thing of it because we had been pals for a long time, and I kept waiting around for him to start having the luck to go with his brains, and hoping that some of it, when he did, would rub off on me. Anyhow, I let it pass, not saying anything, and pretty soon he told me about the stud game and losing a bundle on the triplets.

  “How much did you lose?” I asked.

  “Three grand.”

  “Where did you get three grand?”

  “I didn’t have it,” he said, “and that’s what’s got me worried.”

  “You mean you owe Archie Flowers three grand?”

  “Minus about five hundred that was on the table.”

  “That leaves twenty-five hundred.”

  “You’re a real genius, Carny. You can do arithmetic problems in your head.”

  “Well, I don’t blame you for being worried. How long did Archie give you to raise it?”

  “I’ve got until morning, and morning’s coming too soon. You got any money?”

  “Not that kind, Banty. You know that.”

  “I don’t mean the kind it would take to pay off Archie. I mean enough to get me out of town.”

  “Not enough to get you far enough.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Maybe a hundred. Maybe a little less.”

  “That’s better than nothing. What I’ve got to do is get away and give this some thought, and you can’t think very clearly in the hospital with a broken head, not to mention other bones, and you can’t think at all, if bad comes to worse, on a slab in the morgue.”

  “Where you planning to go?”

  “I was thinking about going down to Uncle Oakley’s farm.”

  “Who’s Uncle Oakley?”

  “Not is. Was. He’s dead. He had this farm down in the hills, about a couple hundred miles south, and he left it to my cousin Theodore when he died, but Theodore doesn’t live on it and can’t sell it, because it’s nothing but a shack on forty acres of rock. So there it is with no one home, and it’s a place to go until I can think of a better place.”

  “What I’d like to know is how you plan to raise twenty-five centuries on forty acres of rock.”

  “Never mind. I’ll do the thinking, which is out of your line. Uncle Oakley’s farm is safe, if not productive, and that’s what’s important at the moment. My mind is made up to go there, and now’s the time for us to start.”

  “Us? Did you say us?”

  “Certainly I said us. Do you expect me to go off to the hills without even someone to play two-handed stud with? Besides, there will be a certain amount of work to do, and you may be useful.”

  “Dammit, Banty, I don’t want to go down to Uncle Oakley’s farm.”

  “The hell you don’t!”

  “I don’t, and I won’t, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “All right, Carny. We’ve been pals a long time, and I thought we’d be pals forever, but I guess I was wrong. If you won’t go, you won’t, and I won’t either, and I hope I never see you again. You get out of here and don’t come back, and don’t even bother coming to my funeral if Archie Flowers kills me tomorrow for not paying off the twenty-five hundred I owe him.”

  Well, how do you feel and what can you do when a pal talks like that? You feel like a heel, that’s how, and you do whatever he asks to get him out of the trouble he’s in, that’s what, and that’s how I felt and what I did. Banty packed some things in a bag, and we went over to my place on Troost, a room over a secondhand furniture store, and I packed some things in a bag, and we started out together for Uncle Oakley’s farm in Banty’s ’56 jalopy. While we were driving south out of town, I counted the money I had, and it came to $98.63. Banty took it and put it in his pocket and said he’d pay me back every cent of it, even though I’d be using my share of it for food and cigarettes and things like that, and even though he was furnishing the car for the trip besides. It shows how Banty was. He was a free-spender and knew how to treat a pal.

  We got out of town on a highway going south, and after a while we came to a service station, and Banty drove in and stopped at the pumps, because the car needed gas. There was a little restaurant attached to the station, a short-order joint for truck drivers, really, and
this reminded Banty that he’d been on a bourbon diet for quite a while, until the bourbon ran out, after which he’d been on a diet of nothing at all, nothing being all he could afford after the stud game. We went inside and had hamburgers and pie and coffee, which took maybe half an hour, and when we came out again, the jalopy was gone, but the attendant said he’d only parked it off to one side, out of the drive. He’d parked it in an open space between the station and a place next door, and this place was one of these highway nightclubs, and it wasn’t any cheap dump, not by a long shot. It was built of gray stone and glass brick, and there was a formal hedge all around it, and a lot of green plants growing in stone urns along a curved drive coming up to the entrance from the highway. When someone opened the front door, going in or coming out, I could hear music for a few seconds, a classy jazz combo, and I wished Banty and I could go in there and have a few drinks and some fun, but we didn’t have the time or the money, and so we got in the jalopy and started south again for Uncle Oakley’s farm.

  We drove along pretty fast for about an hour, and then I went to sleep. I must have slept for almost another hour, and when I woke up we were at least a hundred miles down the highway with maybe another hundred to go. Banty was smoking a cigarette and humming a little tune off-key. I listened to the tune for a while, trying to place it, but I kept thinking all the time that I could hear something else, another sound besides the engine and the wind and Banty’s humming, but I couldn’t decide what it was exactly, or if it was really anything at all besides my imagination. I kept listening and listening and trying to decide what it was and where it came from, if anything from anywhere, and finally I decided it was the sound of snoring in the back seat, which didn’t seem likely. I turned my head, though, to see if it possibly was, and damned if it wasn’t. The sound was snoring, and it was a girl doing it.

  “Banty,” I said, “who’s that girl in the back seat? You know her?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Banty said. “You crazy or something?”

  “Honest.” I said. “There’s a girl in the back seat, and if you’ll only listen you can hear her snore.”

  Banty listened for a few seconds, his head cocked, and then he pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped the car and listened for a few seconds longer before twisting around slowly and looking over the back of the seat. I had a wild notion all of a sudden that I was seeing and hearing things that weren’t there, he seemed so unconcerned, but then he cursed softly under his breath and pinched the end of his nose, which was a gesture he had when he was puzzled by something, and I knew she was there, all right, and Banty saw her.

  “Wake her up and throw her out,” he said.

  That suited me fine, because I don’t mind saying that I’m afraid of strange women who turn up all of a sudden in places where they aren’t wanted or expected. I reached over the back of the front seat and shook her a little, but she only turned away on her side and made a little whimpering sound, and drew up her knees like a kid sleeping, clutching them in her arms.

  I shook her again, harder, and said, “Come on, come on, you crazy dame, get out of there!” and pretty soon she came wide awake in an instant and sat up with a jerk. She yawned and rubbed her eyes and began to scratch in her short, tousled hair.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “You’re in the back seat of my car, that’s where you are,” Banty said.

  “Really? Is that really where I am? Actually in the back seat of your car?”

  ‘That’s what I said,” Banty said, “and what I want to know is how the devil you got there.”

  She kept on scratching in her short hair, staring at us with wide eyes, but she didn’t seem to be scared or confused or anything like that. In fact, there was a little smile on her face that gave me a notion she thought it was all pretty funny, a good joke on someone, but I couldn’t see the joke. What I could see, now that she was sitting up looking at us, was that she was too pretty for her own good, and maybe mine and Banty’s, and I wished she would pull down her dress, which was one of these sheaths that keep riding up.

  “Well,” she said, “I confess I’m a little vague about it, to tell the truth, but I must have simply come out of the Roman Gardens and crawled into your car and gone to sleep. I can’t think of any other way it could have happened, so that must be the way.”

  “What’s the Roman Gardens?” Banty asked. “Is that the place back up the highway with all the hedges and plants and things growing around?”

  ‘That’s it. It’s a nightclub, and I went there with a friend of mine named Tommy. I drank quite a few martinis, and so did Tommy, and he was getting some unacceptable ideas, and matters were complicated by all the martinis I had drunk, which made it impossible for me to be as clever defensively as I usually am. Finally, as I recall, I went to the powder room and then on outside with the intention of getting some air to clear my head. I was feeling dizzy from the martinis, and I thought I’d sit down for a while until I wasn’t dizzy anymore, and the back seat of a car seemed like a good place to sit. I got into one which was handy, and which now turns out to be yours, and it would have been all right, of course, except that I apparently went to sleep, and here I am”

  “Here you are, and there you go,” Banty said. “Get out of here and go back to Tommy.”

  “How far have we come?”

  “About a hundred miles.”

  “In that case, don’t be absurd. A girl can hardly walk a hundred miles anytime at all, let alone on high heels at night by herself on a highway.”

  “That’s your problem, sister. I didn’t invite you go crawl in my car and go to sleep.”

  “Well, that’s no reason why you can’t be a gentleman about it. What was done is done, however unfortunate, and you will simply have to take me back where you found me.”

  ‘This is where we found you, sister, and this is as far as we take you.”

  She was looking at Banty with this queer little smile still on her face, as if she was still convinced that she was a good joke on someone, but I could have told her, knowing Banty, that the joke was on her, and it wasn’t a very good one, either.

  “I promise to make it worth your while if you take me back,” she said.

  “How much?”

  “A thousand dollars.”

  “Come off. Where would a tramp like you get a grand?”

  “You might be surprised. Take me back, I’ll give it to you.”

  “Let me see it.”

  “You insist upon being absurd, don’t you? You must not be very intelligent. I don’t have it with me, of course.”

  “You don’t have it anywhere. I may not be very intelligent, sister, but I’m intelligent enough to know when a common little tramp is telling a fat lie. Besides, I happen to need about three grand at the moment, and I couldn’t take less for my trouble.”

  “All right. Three thousand. It makes no difference to me. It isn’t my money.”

  “No? Whose is it?”

  “My father’s, of course.”

  “Oh, sure. You old man’s a millionaire, that’s what he is.”

  “That’s right. He is.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “His name is Arnold Gotlot, and I’m Felicia Gotlot, and we live at Number One, Gotlot Place. It’s a private street that belongs to my father, and so it’s named after him, and we have the only house on it.” Well, if she was a liar, she was a good one. She said it casually, with the sound of truth, as if it were something she was used to saying, and she couldn’t have picked a better old man if she had tried all night, for Arnold Gotlot was a millionaire, sure enough, and everyone knew that much about him, although not much more than that, for he was a reclusive old devil who didn’t say much and wasn’t seen much and, in fact, made a kind of principle or something out of his privacy.

&
nbsp; Banty had begun to pinch the end of his nose now, which might be a good sign or a bad sign, depending on what caused it and what came of it, and he and Felicia Gotlot, if that’s who she was, were still staring at each other and seemed to be taking each other’s measure. I was on Banty’s side in whatever might develop, but I was beginning to have an uneasy feeling that I might not be backing the winner.

  “In my opinion,” Banty said, “you’re a liar.”

  “In my opinion,” she said, “you’re a fool.”

  “Get out,” he said.

  “If I do, you’ll be sorry.”

  “You’re the one who will be sorry if you don’t,” he said.

  “Kidnapping’s a serious offense,” she said. “Isn’t it Federal? Don’t they put you in the gas chamber for it?”

  Well, now, just like that! Just like explaining something simple to a kid. I felt as if I’d been hit in the belly with a ball bat. It even shook old Banty up. His mouth popped open, and he stopped pinching the end of his nose, and I could tell that he was trying to keep a clear head in spite of being surprised and confused by what she’d suddenly said.

  “What do you mean, kidnapping? Who’s kidnapped anyone?”

  “That depends on whether you take me back to Kansas City,” she said. “If you don’t, I’ve been kidnapped, and you’d better believe it.”

  “You think you can get away with something like that? You just told us you were loaded on gin and went to sleep in the back seat.”

  “That’s what I told you. What I tell my father and the police could be something else entirely.”